Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty

Chapter 10. Claudette and the “Good War”

CHAPTER 10 167 The picture that should have marked the end of Claudette’s Paramount period was So Proudly We Hail (1943); at least she would have played a woman closer to her age, and not one who should have been in her twenties. Once America entered World War II, the studios rallied around the flag, unleashing a barrage of films ranging from sensationalism (breeding camps in Hitler’s Children [RKO, 1943] and the bayoneting of Chinese babies and the insertion of bamboo shoots under fingernails in Behind the Rising Sun [RKO, 1943]) to burlesque (Nazis as bumbling clowns in Desperate Journey [Warners, 1942]). Paramount had no problem packaging some of its films in Old Glory as if it were the latest form of gift wrap. The studio’s contribution to the war effort was modest, yet a few (e.g., Five Graves to Cairo, Hostages, So Proudly We Hail, Till We Meet Again) resisted the temptation to demonize the enemy by placing human drama in the foreground. Paramount made one of the first creditable movies about the war, Wake Island (1942), which balanced male camaraderie with the pain of loss. There is a scene of unusual restraint in Wake Island when a major, himself a widower, attempts to console a lieutenant whose wife was killed at Claudette and the “Good War” Pearl Harbor by reminding him that now they are both men with memories. Claudette must have assumed that, with America’s involvement in the conflict, she would be cast in a war movie, or several of them. From the way she delivered the fadeout speech in Arise, My Love, it seemed as if she knew it was only a matter of time, which was the case. Six months before Pearl Harbor, Claudette joined the entertainment caravan that director Mark Sandrich spearheaded to tour army bases. Other stars included Jack Benny (with whom Claudette performed a skit), Marlene Dietrich, Carole Landis, Dick Powell, and Joan Blondell. After Pearl Harbor, Claudette, like so many Hollywood stars, participated in bond drives. In early 1942, during a Chicago bond rally, Claudette, playwright-screenwriter Allan Scott, and Sandrich overheard people inquiring about the fate of the nurses stationed at Corregidor, which fell to the Japanese the previous May. Sandrich had an inspiration; for the duration, the combat film would be celebrating the achievements of the various branches of the armed services, but who would ever think of dramatizing the contributions of the American Red Cross? Sandrich and Scott had to work fast. The film that became So Proudly We Hail was an unusual undertaking for director-producer Sandrich, who was primarily identified with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals (The Gay Divorcée, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance? and Carefree); Scott was also known for both musicals (Carefree, Swing Time, Follow the Fleet, Roberta, Shall We Dance?) and romantic comedies (Skylark, Sun Valley Serenade). Neither of them seemed the right match for a movie that covered the period from Pearl Harbor to the fall of Corregidor. Yet they embraced the project as if it were their special mission, with Sandrich even bringing in Eunice Hatchitt, a nurse who had been at Bataan and Corregidor, as technical advisor. He also had Scott do an enormous amount of research, much of which found its way into the film through voice-over. Scott plotted So Proudly We Hail as a flashback with a frame narrative , beginning and ending with the nurses’ return voyage to the States. Lt. Janet Davidson (Claudette) is in a state of trauma because she believes 168 CLAUDETTE AND THE “GOOD WAR” her husband is dead. Until the end, which suggests that he is probably alive by the climactic image of a sunburst; some of the nurses function as narrators, providing historical as well narrative background. The war scenes, frequent and bloody, were harrowing. Explosions ripped through the operating room during surgery, killing both a doctor and a nurse; the shelling did not even spare the makeshift outdoor hospital. Although the nurses worked under the specter of death or the possibility of being captured by the Japanese and sent to the brothels, they resolved to stay on until they were ordered to evacuate. The nurses were not motivated by patriotism but by a sense of duty that could not mask the frustration they felt, especially when they learned that General Douglas MacArthur had been sent to...